The air in the hidden canyon was a living thing, soft and damp against the skin, heavy with the scent of wet stone and the ethereal perfume of the Ghost Lily. Beatrice Kincaid worked in a state of reverent focus, her charcoal pencil dancing across the page of her journal.
The lily before her was perfect, its petals the color of moonlight on water, its delicate venation a map of impossible intricacy.
Beside her, resting in a bed of damp moss within a small wooden box, was a carefully excavated bulb—the future, the tonic, the culmination of this entire impossible journey.
A sense of profound peace had settled over her in the past day. The turbulent passion that had consumed her and Wes the night before had receded, leaving in its wake a deep, quiet current of certainty.
The world outside this sanctuary, with its rigid expectations and stifling drawing rooms, felt a million miles away. Here, there was only the work, the earth, and the man who had become its steadfast guardian.
Wes stood twenty yards away, near the narrow entrance of the canyon, his silhouette a stark, comforting presence against the morning light. He wasn’t watching her, but watching everything else.
His gaze swept the rim of the canyon, his body held in a state of relaxed vigilance that she now understood was his natural state. He was a part of this landscape, as integral as the stone and the creek that carved it.
When his eyes did meet hers, a slow smile would touch his lips, a private acknowledgment that erased all distance between them.
She finished the final detail of the stamen, her heart swelling with a joy so pure it was almost painful. They had done it.
They had faced down Croft, restored the water, and found the flower. Her father would have his medicine.
And she… she had found something she hadn’t even known she was looking for.
A sharp, unnatural snap echoed from the canyon rim.
It wasn’t the sound of a falling rock or a breaking branch. It was sharp, metallic, final.
Beatrice looked up, a question on her lips. But Wes was already moving.
In a single, fluid motion, he drew the Colt from his hip, his body coiling like a panther. The relaxed guardian was gone, replaced by the lethal Ranger.
“Beatrice,” he said, his voice a low, urgent command. “Get the box. Get your notes. Stay behind me.”
Her blood ran cold. She didn’t hesitate, scooping the precious specimen box and her leather-bound journal into her satchel.
Her hands, so steady moments before, now trembled. The tranquil sanctuary had become a trap.
Then they appeared. Silhouetted against the sky on the canyon’s rim, like vultures gathering for a feast.
Silas Croft stood in the center, a cruel smile twisting his lips. He held a Winchester rifle, its barrel glinting in the sun.
On either side of him stood four of his hired guns, their faces hard and merciless. They were outnumbered, outgunned, and cornered.
“Well, now,” Croft’s voice boomed, the sound an obscenity in the sacred quiet.
“Look what we have here. The half-breed and his Boston bitch, playing with weeds.”
Wes didn’t reply. He stood his ground, a lone bastion between Croft’s malice and Beatrice.
He pushed her gently but firmly behind a cluster of large boulders. “Stay down,” he whispered, his eyes never leaving the men above.
“You made a mistake, Callahan,” Croft continued, taking a slow, deliberate step down the rocky path into the canyon. His men fanned out, their rifles aimed.
“You should have stayed gone. This land was mine for the taking. This water, this canyon… it’s all mine. You just signed the deed with your own blood when you broke my dam.”
Beatrice’s mind raced, a frantic catalogue of their position. One narrow entrance.
Steep, unscalable walls. No way out.
Her scientific brain, usually a comfort, offered only a cold, stark assessment of their grim reality.
“What do you want, Croft?” Wes called out, his voice dangerously calm.
He was buying time, she knew, but for what?
“Want?” Croft laughed, a dry, rasping sound.
“I want to finish what I started. I want to wipe every trace of you and your kind off this land. And I want to watch you break while I do it.”
The first shot wasn’t from Croft. It came from the side, kicking up dust a foot from Wes’s boot.
It was a warning. A promise.
Wes shoved Beatrice harder behind the rock. “The satchel,” he hissed, his eyes burning with an intensity that terrified her.
“Take it. When I move, you run. Run for the canyon mouth and don’t you dare look back. Understand?”
“No! Wes, I won’t leave you!”
The words were a strangled cry. The thought of abandoning him was a physical agony.
“This isn’t a discussion!” he snarled, his grip tightening on her arm for a brief, desperate second.
“Your father. The lily. It can’t be for nothing. We can’t be for nothing. Now go!”
He didn’t wait for her answer. With a roar that was pure, primal fury, he fired two shots toward the men on the right flank, sending them scrambling for cover.
In that split second of chaos, he lunged to the left, drawing their attention, making himself the sole target.
“Run, Beatrice! NOW!”
Her body, fueled by terror and his desperate command, finally obeyed. Clutching the satchel to her chest, she ran.
She scrambled over rocks, her practical skirts catching on thorns, her lungs screaming for air. She risked a single glance back and saw a scene from a nightmare.
Wes was a blur of motion, using the terrain with breathtaking skill, but he was one man against five. A rifle butt caught him in the ribs, and he staggered.
Another man tackled him from behind.
Tears streamed down her face, blurring the path ahead. Every instinct screamed at her to turn back, to fight with him, to die with him.
But the weight of the satchel—the weight of his sacrifice—propelled her forward.
It can’t be for nothing. His words echoed in her soul, a brutal mantra.
She reached the mouth of the canyon, gasping for breath, and dared one last look. They had him.
Four men held him down while Croft stood over him, laughing. Wes fought, his power immense even when restrained, but the numbers were too great.
She saw the glint of Croft’s pistol as he brought it down in a vicious arc against Wes’s head. Wes went limp.
A sob tore from her throat, raw and broken. She had to keep moving.
She plunged into the scrub brush beyond the canyon, forcing her legs to carry her away from the wreckage of her world.
***
Pain was the first thing to claw its way back into Wes’s consciousness. A searing, white-hot agony that started in his skull and radiated through every limb.
He tasted copper and dust. When he managed to pry one eye open, the world swam in a crimson haze.
Silas Croft’s boots were inches from his face.
“Not so tough now, are you, Ranger?” Croft’s voice was slick with triumph.
He nudged Wes’s ribs with his boot, eliciting a groan that Wes couldn’t suppress. “I told you I’d break you.”
Wes tried to push himself up, but his arms screamed in protest. He could feel the slick warmth of blood matting the hair at the back of his head.
His vision cleared enough to see two of Croft’s men holding him by the shoulders, forcing him to his knees.
“Where is she?” Wes rasped, his throat raw.
Croft chuckled. “Don’t you worry about her. She won’t get far. But first, you and I have some unfinished business.”
The beating was methodical, cruel, and designed not to kill, but to shatter. Each blow was punctuated by Croft’s venomous words.
A fist to the jaw. “This is for my dam.”
A kick to his already bruised ribs. “This is for my authority.”
He grabbed Wes by the hair, forcing his head up, their faces inches apart. Wes’s vision swam, but he met the man’s gaze with a defiance that burned through the pain.
“And this…” Croft sneered, his fist connecting with Wes’s stomach, driving the air from his lungs in a sickening whoosh. “…is for thinking you, a filthy half-breed, could ever stand in my way.”
Wes collapsed, his body a symphony of agony. He lay in the dirt, the sacred ground of his ancestors, and felt a cold, encroaching darkness.
He could hear Croft talking to his men, his voice distant and distorted.
“Leave him. The buzzards can have what’s left. He’s broken.”
Croft spat on the ground near Wes’s head.
“Now, let’s clean up this mess. I don’t want anyone ever finding these pathetic little flowers. Or her. Burn it. Burn it all.”
The command registered in the fog of Wes’s mind, a new, sharper terror cutting through the pain. Burn it.
He fought to lift his head, his muscles screaming. He saw one of Croft’s men with a torch, setting it to the dry brush piled at the narrow canyon entrance.
The flames caught with a hungry roar, a wall of fire and smoke sealing the only exit.
Beatrice.
She had escaped him, but she was trapped. Trapped by the fire.
The thought was more agonizing than any physical blow. He had sent her running from one cage into another.
As Croft and his men mounted their horses, their dark shapes receding from his fading vision, Wes’s last conscious thought was not of the pain, or the defeat, or the coming darkness. It was the image of Beatrice’s face, her eyes wide with terror and a love that had bloomed in the most unforgiving of lands.
Then, everything went black.
***
Miles away, hidden in a rocky outcrop, Beatrice had finally stopped running. Her body was a mass of scratches and bruises, her breath coming in ragged, painful sobs.
The satchel was safe, its contents intact. But the cost was unbearable.
She told herself he was strong. He was a survivor.
He would find a way. The desperate hope was a flickering candle against a hurricane of despair.
Then she smelled it.
Acrid smoke, thick and oily, tainting the clean desert air. She scrambled to the top of her hiding place, her heart a cold, heavy stone in her chest.
Her eyes followed the plume of black smoke back to its source.
The mouth of the canyon.
A solid wall of orange flame raged where the entrance had been, licking up the stone walls, devouring everything in its path. Croft hadn’t just beaten Wes.
He was salting the earth. He was destroying the Ghost Lilies, erasing the evidence, and…
The realization hit her with the force of a physical blow.
She was trapped. The fire blocked the only way out.
Behind her lay miles of impassable, sheer-walled canyons. Wes was gone, left for dead or worse.
The sanctuary was an inferno. She was utterly, completely alone, a prisoner in the very place she had found her freedom.
The darkest hour had fallen.